Tester meets with US Supreme Court Nominee Gorsuch

Carrie Doyle | February 9, 2017, 0:20

In each case Democrats intend to use the maximum time allowed under Senate rules to debate the nominations, which may result in a series of late-night votes this week and delay Mnuchin's approval until Saturday.

In interviews this week, two others saidthey are apprehensive about Gorsuch but haven't made a decision.

"I'm thrilled that we have a president that is recognizing that he does have some power".

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York meets with Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, who are all up for reelection in 2018 in states that Trump won handily, will be key to the progress of Trump's agenda and to getting his Supreme Court nominee confirmed. They wanted a voice in the future direction of the High Court. Many Democrats and liberals have come out against the Gorsuch nomination, because he is considered by legal scholars to be a strict conservative jurist in the mold of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, whose passing past year opened up the seat on the high court. The proximate cause of the problem was, of course, the refusal of the Republican leadership in the Senate even to hold hearings, much less permit an up-or-down vote, on Merrick Garland, President Obama's choice to succeed the conservative justice.

Gorsuch sits on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The judge is a skier and an angler, suggesting he might be sympathetic to environmental concerns; but Justice Scalia's enthusiasm for trout fishing certainly did not temper his skepticism about environmental regulation! "Just this weekend, he impugned the "so-called judge" who struck down the president's travel ban". The Supreme Court has upheld nondelegation challenges to congressional enactments in only a handful of cases, both decided in the 1930's, and the late Justice Scalia wrote an opinion for the modern Court rejecting a nondelegation challenge to the Clean Air Act.

Are Gorsuch's views the proper approach to judging mainstream? President Trump would, of course, be responsible for appointing judges to the new court.

The report said top Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Dick Durbin of IL, want to question Gorsuch more about his involvement. "In a little more than two weeks, President Donald Trump has put an unprecedented strain on the Constitution", Schumer declares, in the opening sentence of his diatribe. Judicial Crisis Network is running broadcast, radio and digital ads in multiple states, and Severino is appearing on radio and television shows as their grassroots organizers pick up around the country.